Heeler Security Inc., a pioneering startup in the application security space, is announcing the results of its recent Seed Series funding round, having raised $8.5 million. Led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from Storm Ventures, this funding will be directed toward product innovation and expanding enterprise teams, propelling the company’s ambition of remediating today’s complex security challenges.
As applications continue to become more and more complex, the nature of securing those apps becomes just as elaborate. The nature of modern applications paired with the eroded developer trust and productivity formed as a result, security teams are left with expanding, obscure attack surfaces that are fragmenting security insights across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), according to Heeler.
Targeting these security inefficiencies that result in greater risk and reactive firefighting, Heeler is driven by a vision to redefine application security with real-time security and business context, detection, enrichment, and posture management, and response orchestration capabilities.
“There's this expanding attack surface of cloud apps that's fragmented risk management and overburdened teams and has really increased what we think of as security debt, which is this form of technical debt that is around security issues that have not been resolved,” explained Chris Hertz, CEO of Heeler. “Companies have really hit this tipping point where security debt has now started to hinder productivity and growth, and it's necessitated a shift towards what we think of as security resilience, where security and developers must operate together, in real time, to address both critical issues, reduce the security debt that exists, and then really limit the risk.”
ProductDNA, Heeler’s patent-pending security technology, closes the gap between security and developers by unifying the code, behavior, and business context of an enterprise’s applications in real time, at scale. According to Heeler, by abstracting the complexity out of understanding the business impact of an application’s threat surface, ProductDNA establishes a seamless chain of custody between the intended state in code and the running state in production.
“[Product DNA] is the revolution that we really believe has to happen—...that you have to move away from this ‘test and fix’ approach where we're just creating findings and overwhelming people with all this unverified noise, and instead move to a place where we can provide them with true contextual understanding of what's actually important, so they can focus on those issues and how [they understand] the impact of the work they're doing directly from within the existing workflows,” said Hertz.
Heeler’s technology embeds security directly into the development lifecycle, offering a shared operating platform for both security and developers that empowers developers to understand the security impact of their code changes. By automating repetitive and time-intensive security assessment tasks—and therefore reducing noise and false positives—Heeler enhances overall security while increasing the efficiency of security workflows.
“Everyone wants to do incredible work, and everyone wants to build secure software; it's just so time consuming right now because of all the challenges they face…it's demoralizing,” said Hertz. “We want to actually be able to deliver an experience to developers and to security professionals where people say, ‘What this is, is amazing. I can go and focus on what matters. I can use my time in a way that has an enormous impact, and I can build solutions that deliver on this mandate of customer trust that every organization wants to live up to, and that every individual wants to do.’”
“Heeler is making it effortless for security teams and developers to easily collaborate on preventing and managing security risks throughout their entire SDLC,” said Justin Pagano, director of security risk and trust at Klaviyo. “As innovation accelerates cloud and application complexity, Heeler’s ProductDNA provides a scalable and simplified approach to maintaining a holistic, real-time view of SDLC security and lineage with quickly actionable ownership, integrity, and security risk context.”
For more information about this news, visit www.heeler.com.